Heading levels to use for topic titles and chapter titles

[Monkey Girl]

I am setting up my first single-source project that will have WebHelp and PDF targets. I already have many topics set up that were created previously when this project started as a simple Help-only project. Those topics use H1 for the 1st topic heading (and topic title).

Now I'm trying to set up page layouts and a print TOC, and I'm getting confused about how and where Chapter titles should be entered and what level heading should be used. In my current Word doc manual, the chapter titles are the H1 header level, and the separate topics within each chapter use H2. I'd really like to avoid redoing all my existing topics to use H2 for the 1st topic heading instead of H1.

Is setting up an H1.ChapterTitle class the answer? Do chapter titles need to be in their own topics? One other point to note is that I'll need to use some type of ChapterTitle variable in the header of my page layout.

Thanks!

[whunter]

You can leave them all at H1 if you enable "Use TOC depth for heading levels" in your print target (Advanced tab). When the output is created, the heading levels will be automatically adjusted based on the relationship in the TOC.

Also, to make sure your chapters start anew, in the TOC properties you need to mark the chapter topic with "Start a new chapter document" (Printed Output tab).

Might want to browse through the Printed Output Guide available from the Help menu in Flare.

[LTinker68]

And just to clarify, setting a topic as the start of a new chapter is independent of the structure of the TOC. For instance, if you don't use books at all in the TOC, then you could have the first, eight, tenth topics set to start as chapters. If you're like me, though, you use books to organize the TOC. In my case, I set each top-level book to be the start of a new chapter. It doesn't change the display of the TOC at all unless you have the TOC to show in table view, so the books-for-chapters is just an easy way for me to see visually where I'm starting a new chapter.